Free Geek, "Helping The Needy Get Nerdy", is a great organisation based in Portland, Oregon. The belief behind the organisation is very simple: many people discard IT equipment that they don't want, that other people need.

Free, open source software, where the human readable definition of the software (aka source code) is made freely available for inspection, modification and redistribution, is as old as software itself. When software was first conceived and developed, it was simply there to make hardware more …